


Penance

by JustJasper



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-09
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:05:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2566022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustJasper/pseuds/JustJasper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age</p>
            </blockquote>





	Penance

**Author's Note:**

> Written for CM Prompt Meme.
> 
> This was written several years before the episode 'Restoration' aired.

_Dear Derek,_  
  
It has a Chicago postmark, uses his first name, and is handwritten. Not his mother’s hand, or his sister’s. Nobody else from Chicago would write to him.  
  
 _I am writing to you to express my deepest apologies and to beg for your forgiveness for what I’ve done._  
  
He knows immediately who it is, and suddenly it becomes a jumble, the words don't stay still.  
  
 _I’ve been thinking about what happened for a long time, reflecting on my actions._  
  
Morgan grabs the wall, trying to steady himself. He can hear the words in Buford’s voice in his head, the voice he hears in his nightmares, documenting his failures.  
  
 _Being in prison has helped me to better understand what made me do the things that I did, that I inappropriately touched fifteen young boys over twenty years._  
  
He wonders if he’s going by a program of steps, of which one is admission. It’s not enough though, ‘inappropriately touched’ is diluted speak. He wonders why the letter isn’t just ‘I’m sorry I raped and molested you’ over and over again until the ink in the pen has gone.  
  
 _I have suffered so much while incarcerated, that I finally understand the pain you must have been in._  
  
Morgan laughs then, a bitter, thready sound that’s almost a sob. There’s paragraph after paragraph of it, in a letter of apparent penance where every other word is ‘I’ and ‘me’.  
  
 _You were my favourite member of the youth club, and I saw such promise in you. I wanted the best for you, and I knew you needed guidance after your father was killed._  
  
It comes as little surprise, but still feels like a blow with a fist to the side of his head that five years in jail hasn’t changed the warped view, the insistence that he’d wanted to help. He can’t, or won’t, admit he is a predator, not outright.  
  
 _Even though my actions were illegal and inappropriate, I believed I wasn’t hurting you. I loved you like a son, I didn’t want to hurt you._  
  
Flesh memories of bruises and pain surface and Morgan’s knees go, because nobody could possibly say those things and believe them. Nobody who had held down a child and forced himself inside their body, 'willing' only under coercion, could possibly claim not to have wanted to hurt them.   
  
He lands hard on the wooden floor of the hallway, can feel the paper threatening to tear under the strain of his hands.  
  
 _Although not conventional, I thought our relationship was healthy and good for both of us. I only wanted what was best for you. You never gave any indication that I was engaging in behaviour that you didn’t like, though I recognised that you have since come to the conclusion it was not something you appreciated._  
  
The paper rips, and Morgan presses the heels of his hands against his eyes as he fights back tears and sobbing and nausea. He could have gone his whole life without hearing from him, could have pretended he’d died suffering and crying in the night like Derek had spent so many as a child under his hand.  
  
 _I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Please write to me, I would like to hear from you._  
  
He doesn’t read it again, doesn’t need to; those words are never going to leave his mind, scorched into his memory with bruises in the shapes of hand prints and the sensation of heavy breath against his neck.  
  
He burns the letter in the sink and watches the charred fragments of paper crumble and break away, glowing orange at the edges and dying against the damp metal of the basin. He lets the water rinse away the physical evidence of Buford’s continued existence. But even as the last black ash swirls away, he knows he is the living canvas for his abuser’s legacy.


End file.
